The Diego de la Vega Coffee Co-op is a project developed by Fran Ilich that offers organic coffee sourced locally in Chiapas, Mexico from Zapatista autonomous farms. Its goal is to connect social movements and geographical regions – Chiapas and New York City – and to create a horizontal financial flow between social movements.

I was honored to participate for the second time as an artist resource for three districts as part of PBNYC‘s participatory budgeting initiative to bring community funding and decision making back to the neighborhood.

On Sunday, April 28th join The Brooklyn Torch and TimeBanksNYC at NURTUREart Gallery for an afternoon of play exploring cooperative exchange. The Brooklyn Torch Project invites David Morgan, a co-creator of new board game ‘Co-opoly’ made by Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA) to demonstrate and support gameplay.

In Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives, players collaborate to found and run a democratic business. This is an exciting game of skill and solidarity, where everyone wins – or everybody loses.

Jessie Reilly of TimeBanksNYC will also facilitate a variety collaborative games, including a new twist on surrealist drawing and storytelling exercises which explore themes raised by participant’s relationships to time and money. As part of the Brooklyn Torch Economic Kindling Package, everyone who joins and completes a game with gallery visitors and neighbors, will be rewarded for their play-training session in Brooklyn Torches, North Brooklyn’s local currency. Brooklyn Torches are good for a wide range of local services and goods on our registry and in our Trade Stores.

Apr 19 – May 16, 2013
Opening Reception: Fri. April 19, 7-9PM
NURTUREart Gallery, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn NY
The Brooklyn Torch Project is very excited to be in this month’s NURTUREart exhibition Cashing Out, curated by Petrushka Bazin Larsen – the first exhibition to use NURTUREart’s new Online Registry as a curatorial resource. Cashing Out features artists’ musings on our current financial system and their creative proposals for establishing alternative economies. The exhibition is informed by economic inequities, excessive production of goods, unfair wages, discord between nations and an overall desire to become a more sustainable society where we rely on each other and our natural abilities to make ends meet. Looking to the artist as an author of innovation and creative problem solving, Cashing Out also considers how our current economy can be destabilized using community networks, cooperative economics, bartering, and other exchanges.

By bringing together video, sculpture, participatory prompts and ephemera by Shinsuke Aso, Nicky Enright, Heather Hart, Mary Jeys, Michelle Kaufman, Carolyn Lambert, and Scott Massey, the gallery becomes a space for conversation about these circumstances and hopefully a catalytic platform for new solutions.

Every first Saturday of every month in 2013, I plan to hold a Brooklyn Torch Trade Store at my studio in Greenpoint. If you’re around, you should come:
50 Dobbin Street (between Berry and Norman)
Brooklyn, NY 11222

Third Annual Public Art Potluck
Engage our Create Change artists in conversations about their projects and creative ideas set in communities across New York City and Philadelphia. You’ll hear about socially-engaged art projects ranging from yoga-based printmaking in Jackson Heights to envisioning a new waterfront for the South Bronx to a multimedia installation highlighting the history of garment workers in Sunset Park.

What Do We Bring? Yummy Food and Public Art!
What Do You Bring? An Open Mind and Creative Ideas!